Unformed Agency and Narrative Resistance in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians

Abstract:This essay draws on theories of the unconscious and trauma to examine the representation of the barbarian girl in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. While scholars have claimed that the Magistrate’s narrative production and interpretative method act as a form of resistance to the Empire, I offer that the barbarian girl creates models of resistance against imperial oppression in which she becomes the producer of meaning. In my reading of the novel, I foreground the ways in which the barbarian girl escapes and eludes the Magistrate’s attempt to foreclose her narrative within the history of the Empire. In doing so, Coetzee’s text presents the barbarian girl as the basis for an emergent, ethical future, a temporal disruption of Empire, such that her narrative creates the conditions for social change. Rather than Coetzee’s claim that South African literature functions in bondage, Waiting for the Barbarians offers the battleground of the psyche as the space of potential liberation from which a poetics of futurity emerges.